from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Getting enough sleep has different meaning for different people, even though most people need about 7-9 hours a night. The CDC only started looking at how much sleep Americans have been getting since 2009, but the trend seems to be less and less, unfortunately. An estimated 50-70 million Americans have chronic sleep or wakefulness disorders, so figuring out sleep and its genetic components could benefit a lot of people.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Every cell (or nearly every cell) in your body contains the same copy of DNA instructions. Somehow, though, your heart muscle cells know how to beat while your red blood cells do a very different bodily function. There's quite a lot about DNA that we know about, but the genetic process is still not fully understood.

Did you know that your genetic expressions change with the seasons? Researchers have known for some time that DNA seems to react to different parts of the day, but they've also recently seen that gene expression can change with the time of year, as the days are shorter/longer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it appears that thousands of genes related to the immune system are more active in the winter. #WinterIsComingDNA [url]

The core function of the OURA ring — which, by the way, looks very nice for a piece of wearable tech — is sleep tracking. It monitors your pulse, body temperature and movements, and uses those to derive detailed information about your sleep cycles and habits. Where it truly shines is in presenting that information: it doesn't just dump a bunch of data on you, but compiles well-designed and easy-to-read graphs and charts into an ongoing sleep log. It also doesn't expect you to figure out what to do with the data all by yourself: the OURA pulls key observations and crafts recommendations, letting you know when you're well rested and ready for activity or when you should take it easy for a day, and informs you of patterns it notices, such as what level of physical activity during the day combined with what bedtime leads to you getting the soundest sleep. If it works well, it could unlock a host of life improvements for the average person, since very few of us consistently get a good night's sleep or pay much attention to the factors that affect us. Collecting this data is one thing, but making it friendly and accessible is a game-changer.

The Bad

The OURA only reads a few core physical metrics: your pulse waveform, body temperature, and motion level, all of which are then fed through its proprietary algorithm to derive sleep stages. The creators claim that the results match those produced by a proper monitored sleep study, but I do have to wonder just how much room for error there is when making those complex determinations based on just a few indicators, since it seems like a number of individual factors could throw off the algorithm. In that sense, it puts me in mind of bathroom scales that claim to measure body fat based on electrical resistance — leading to wildly inconsistent and inaccurate readings. However, the OURA does appear considerably more sophisticated than that, and it will be interesting to see how it fares when adopted in bigger numbers by a wider variety of people.

The Private

Of course, there's a bigger conversation to be had around devices like the OURA, and one that was a workshop subject at the Copia Institute's Inaugural Summit this year: privacy and ethics. As more people begin gathering more and more data about their health — by using devices like this and by leveraging technology to take greater control of their medical history and records — it's even more important than usual that we give consideration to how that data is handled. On the one hand, people have a right to control this sort of information about themselves; on the other hand, there is huge potential for data-based medical advancement if scientists are able to look at that information in aggregate. The OURA is collaborating with an online platform dedicated to personal data management and sharing to give users control over their sleep data and the ability to contribute some or all of it to anonymized data sets — but there also isn't a tremendous amount of information about privacy on the OURA's project page. I think many potential users would like to know more on that front before putting a monitor on their finger and pressing record.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Sleep is a vital bodily function -- even if no one knows exactly why we do it. There's a lot of sleep research, but not a lot of solid answers for the origins of sleep. But that doesn't mean we're not learning cool stuff about sleeping all the time. Here are just a few tidbits of research on the topic of sleeping.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Maybe you've met a few people who seem to be able to function completely normally on just 4 hours of sleep a night. Those people, sometimes called the 'sleepless elite' who make up about 1-3% of the population, may have a genetic inclination towards not requiring as much sleep as the rest of us. Short sleepers can get away without 8 hours of sleep a night, but most people can't. Here are just a few links on the importance of sleep.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping, so some people would like to make (better?) use of the time we supposedly waste lying in bed each night. People have tried learning foreign languages on tape while asleep. People want to train themselves to quit smoking while they snore away. The list of things people might want to try to learn unconsciously is endless -- because it seems like an effortless way to try to train our brains. Here are just a few links on the topic of sleep learning and some successful examples of it.

from the are-made-of-this dept

Arianna Huffington has been talking about the importance of "sleeping your way to the top" for years now, though in just doing a search to find some of her earlier speeches for that I see Huffington Post, just yesterday, ran another article on this. Of course, she means the importance of getting a good night's sleep (which is exactly what you thought, right?). For this week's awesome stuff, we've got three crowdfunding projects related to sleep and dreaming.

First up, we've got SHADOW, the Community of Dreamers. It's an interesting project, trying to build software and a community to help people "remember and record" your dreams -- and then share that data, such that it might become useful someday. Like many people, I will often wake up from an interesting/strange/amusing/amazing/frightening dream and think that it was so vivid that I'm bound to remember it, only to have it completely fade away within a short while. The goal here is to prompt people to record their dreams the moment they wake up (the app itself is an alarm clock that gradually wakes you up, like plenty of others on the market, but then prompts you to record your dream). And, then the information is "anonymized" (which sounds easy in theory, but isn't always in practice) and added to the database with some metadata (again, making me not so sure how anonymous it really is...). Still, an interesting project, though, I'm not convinced that there's any great global linkage to be gleaned from everyone's dreams, as the creators imply. It still might make an interesting research dataset though -- though, just wait until the NSA hacks into it.

One oddity of this campaign is that they had different tiers based on which phone platform -- iPhone, Android or Windows -- you use, and the one that got the most supporters will be developed and released first. iPhone has this one beat, hands down, which might be a bit of a turnoff for supporters from other platforms. Still, the campaign shot well past its $50,000 goal and is over $80,000 now. It ends tonight, so there are just a few hours left until it closes.

Next up, we've got Luci, the lucid dreamer inducer. When I was a kid, I first read about lucid dreaming in Richard Feynman's collection of memoirish stories, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in which he talks about his own experience figuring out how to realize he was in a dream and then controlling the experience. Of course, today people probably think of the movie Inception or something like that. After reading about Feynman's experience, I tried to copy what he did with no luck, and even checked a few books on "lucid dreaming" out of the library -- and still no luck. So I gave up and really stopped thinking about it altogether. But I know some people get really into it, and there are a few devices on the market that claim to be able to help, with this being another one. However, most of the other products are masks that detect REM and then flash some lights in your eyes, which you then need to realize means you're in a dream. These guys claim that Luci does more by using brainwaves, and a voice telling you you're in a dream. I have no idea how effective this actually is. The company shows its own tests, but they appear to lack basic scientific rigor (even at the most basic level).

The project is already way overfunded -- already breaking $200,000 (Canadian) of the $40,000 target with a week and a half to go. That's fairly impressive for a $150 device that may not work. Apparently there are a lot of folks willing to take a chance on controlling their dreams. Somehow, that's not too surprising.

And, finally, we've got the other semi-obsession of many people I know when it comes to discussions about sleep: polyphasic sleep (sleeping in a bunch of shorter bursts, rather than getting a full night's sleep at once). There are a bunch of apps out there to help people who want to switch to a polyphasic sleep system, but SmartSleep is working on one that looks decent, with some cool features if you really want to try out polyphasic sleep. Unlike a lot of apps I've seen that are just alarm clock/nap timers, this one really seems focused on helping out with polyphasic sleep, including helping to automatically adjust your sleep schedule if you miss a nap and providing additional information on polyphasic sleep.

This project appears to have just launched yesterday, so it doesn't have much support at all yet. They're seeking $35,000, which seems a bit steep -- especially as I'm not sure how big the polyphasic sleep community really is. Still, there's lots of time so maybe it'll get there.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If there was a disease that incapacitated a person for about a third of his/her life (say for 8 hours every day), you might think that researchers would want to find a cure. Well, that disease is called sleep, and folks are looking to why we need to sleep and how we might take more control over our sleep needs. And for the people who can't get enough sleep (over 40 million American insomniacs), there are sleeping pills that attempt to keep them asleep. So far, it doesn't seem like we've made much progress figuring out our sleep problems, but here are a few links that you might want to read before bedtime.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are numerous hypotheses for how and why sleep is important. The facts show that a wide range of animals need sleep and that a lack of sleep is extremely unhealthy, especially if sleep deprivation lasts more than a few days. For example, sleep-deprived lab rats will die more quickly than rats deprived of food. Sleep is clearly essential to normal functioning, but there's no definitive reason for it. Here are just a few interesting articles that discuss the mystery of the function behind sleep.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Few people wouldn't want the ability to remember facts with ease. The skill of memorizing vast amounts of information could be useful for so many tasks, but unfortunately, while there are a variety of techniques to help with impressive memory tricks, there's no magic bullet for general learning. Here are just a few interesting studies on memory that could be worth remembering later.